Benazir Bhutto

Benazir Bhutto (21 June 1953-27 December 2007) was Prime Minister of Pakistan from 2 December 1988 to 6 August 1990 (succeeding Muhammad Khan Junejo and preceding Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi) and from 19 October 1993 to 5 November 1996 (succeeding Moeenuddin Ahmad Qureshi and preceding Malik Meraj Khalid). Bhutto was the daughter of Pakistan Peoples Party leader Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and she led the PPP from 1982 to 2007; she became the first woman to head a democratic government in a Muslim nation. Bhutto was assassinated by the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan in 2007, as she had become an enemy of both the government (for her anti-military and pro-democracy policies) and the Islamist faction of politics (for her secularist and women's rights platforms).

Biography
Born in Karachi, Sindh, Pakistan on 21 June 1953 as the daughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Benazir studied history and politics at Harvard and Oxford, where she became the first foreign president of the Oxford Union Society. She returned upon her father's assumption of the presidency in 1971 and advised him on foreign policy issues, and she was placed under house arrest when her father was deposed in 1977. She was allowed to go into exile in Britain in 1984, where she founded the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy in Pakistan. Bhutto returned to Pakistan in 1986 and, with her mother, was chairwoman of the Pakistan Peoples Party. After an unsuccessful attempt to come to power on a wave of populist support in 1987, she reformed the PPP by moving it to the right, and by bringing the party's administration firmly under her control. This enabled the PPP to emerge from the 1988 elections with a simple majority, and she became Prime Minister of Pakistan. She aimed to improve relations with India, re-enter the Commonwealth, and reduce Pakistan's involvement in Afghanistan, and she was accused of abetting corruption, failing to eradicate any of the country's domestic problems (such as the presence of 3,000,000 Afghan refugees in Pakistan), and abuse of power, leading to her being dismissed in August 1990 by President Ghulam Ishaq Khan. She lost the subsequent elections, but she staged a spectacular comeback in teh 1993 elections. The main challenge of her term was Islamic fundamentalism, which forced her to concede to the introduction of sharia in one of the areas of the North-West Frontier Province. While demonstatations and riots against the government and betwen various Islamic factions paralyzed the country at times, the Islamic fundamentalist movement gained a potent political challenger to Bhutto in Imran Khan, the alluring former cricket star and playboy returned to his Islamic roots. She lost the 1997 election and angrily went into exile in Dubai, leading her party mainly through proxies. She returned to Pakistan in 2007 to compete in the 2008 elections, emphasizing civilian oversight of the military and opposition to growing Islamist violence. On 27 December 2007, as she waved to a crowd while leaving a PPP rally in Rawalpindi aboard a bulletproof vehicle, she was shot at three times and killed by a suicide bomber (who made use of ball bearings). The assassin was a boy from South Waziristan, and the government blamed the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan on her murder. Both the ruling military government and the Islamist radicals benefited from her assassination.